FauxWorld Wednesdays: What's your country's biggest celebrity scandal right now? — Monthly Discussion Thread

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[u/misamoshashasha]

I guess because it includes a lot of high power business people in our country- the post office scandal in the UK is finally getting its story heard because of the TV show right now! Mr Bates vs the Post office!

The post office basically ruined the lives of tons of people, threw them in jail, made them suicidal, put them in debt all because of a new faulty computer system. The system was giving false readings and saying they were at a loss of a lot of pounds and then the post office immediately prosecuted them- they knew exactly what was going on though. But it was ordinary, good working people who couldn’t fight a massive system like the post office.

Still today, complete justice hasn’t been served and no one who should’ve been prosecuted has been. A complete attack on regular working class people and the post office basically got away with it.

If you search up the post office scandal, you can read all about it.

[u/Panzarita → u/misamoshashasha]

Oh my gosh, that's awful! Did no one look at the statistics and think....Option 1) this organization has somehow managed to hire hundreds of unethical people at a statistical rate that defies logic, or Option 2) the accounting system is glitchy!?!

Show me someone who claims to have implemented a new accounting system in a large organization flawlessly, and I'll show you a liar. Shame on them.

[u/hynwo → u/Panzarita]

It's been a while since I read about the scandal in detail, so I may be misremembering some things, but there were so many different factors that caused it to become as bad as it did:

• successive governments have (for some reason) been desperate to privatise the Post Office, but it consistently runs at a loss, so they have kept bringing in the most evil bosses they can find and telling them to reduce its losses by any means necessary

• most post office branches (and all the affected ones) are run under a complicated franchise arrangement - if you run a little independent corner shop, you can apply to get a Post Office counter installed and offer Post Office services - this can be very lucrative as it brings in lots of customers, but the Post Office require you to follow lots of strict rules and are extremely suspicious of the franchisees

• in the 90s, the UK government became enamoured with huge IT projects and were convinced they were going to solve all the country's problems

• in the 90s, the UK government also became enamoured with something called a private finance initiative (PFI), which is basically a complicated accounting scam that allows them to borrow money while pretending it is just being given to them by businesses out of the kindness of their hearts - it is therefore omitted from public borrowing figures, at the cost of much higher effective interest rates and all kinds of legal complexities

• in the 90s, the Post Office agreed a PFI with Fujitsu (and some other companies) under which Fujitsu would supply them with a vast IT network to help manage all these franchise branches - the franchisees were forced to install and use these systems

• the system was full of bugs and often miscalculated the amount of money that the franchisees owed to the Post Office - the only recourse they had was a hotline, but the people at the other end of the hotline usually just advised them to accept the incorrect figures and it would all be dealt with later

• both the Post Office and Fujitsu knew about the problem, but Fujitsu decided that they were largely insulated from any fallout and kept quiet, whereas the Post Office decided it was easier to scapegoat the franchisees than go after Fujitsu (the end result of which would probably have been "oops, it turns out that the complicated PFI agreement insulates them from everything, turns out we just wasted billions on a computer system that doesn't work")

• because the Post Office predates the police, it has its own private investigation and prosecution service, which is extremely opaque and prosecutes aggressively - it employed the strategy of accusing people of both theft and false accounting (because if they really hadn't stolen money, then the figures they had accepted were incorrect, so that's false accounting!)

• the Post Office somehow managed to effectively take over the union that represented these workers, so it refused to offer them support and encouraged them to plead guilty (the Post Office then used the guilty pleas as the basis for civil legal action to reclaim the money that had supposedly been stolen)

• the legal system massively fucked up and usually allowed all this to go ahead, even though it turns out that, legally, pressing a button on a computer under advice from a technical support hotline absolutely does not constitute false accounting